Millie Chen and Arzu Ozkal: SRS (Silk Road Songbook) in Buffalo

Millie Chen and Arzu Ozkal’s exhibition about the Silk Road, conventionally understood as the trade pathway between East and West, crossing a vast mostly overland route from Constantinople (after 1453, Istanbul) to China, was innovative and ambitious. The Silk Road routes offered connection across empires—connecting cultures, religions, and languages, as well as goods—and travelers faced many obstacles along the way including bandits, taxation, and disease. Understanding the complex history of the region reveals the strength of trade, desire for wealth, quality of craftsmanship in fine and ordinary goods, innovation, and creativity in a part of the world little known or understood by people in the West.SRS (Silk Road Songbook) is more than about the Silk Road; it is about representation. In fact, all exhibits are layered acts of representation. The first layer is of expression; the second is of communication with an audience through the curated objects of expression. In this case, underlying these two elements is a third, that of creating an alternative vision of the Silk Road, by stripping it of Orientalist orientations. I am referring to Edward Said’s critique of the field of Orientalism, later area studies, which sought to create a hegemonic construct of the Orient to control it and therefore use it. Orientalism constructs the Orient from an Occidental viewpoint; as Said explains, “that Orientalism makes sense at all depends more on the West than on the Orient, and this sense is directly indebted to various Western techniques of representation that make the Orient visible, clear, ‘there’ in discourse about it.”1 Setting out to make representations of the Silk Road involves confronting not only the space, but the ideological and geographic construct of the region by the Occident. Who can understand this space and the people in it and how to understand it? Chen and Ozkal’s answer to these questions was this exhibit.Entering a large space in a former church in Buffalo, New York, one discovered five large screens with scenes of rural spaces projected on them. In each, a singer and musicians walk into the rural space and perform a short song. Each song is projected sequentially and in order of the screens, so a viewer could begin with the first screen and walk to the next one to view the next song and so on. On each screen, a set of musicians walk up to the microphones set up in a rural location and leave them when they are finished. The sequential layering of projections, as well as allowing the viewer to see the performers walk on and off camera, created the sensation that one is present for the performance. The total piece ran twenty-two minutes. The exhibit was minimalistic, by which I mean there are only screens. There were no tags on the wall indicating what was being projected, when or where each song was performed, who was performing, or what was being sung. This information is only available in a separate pamphlet. The message seems to be that rather than relying on didactic information to construct a narrative of what is being shown, the viewer should simply be present.Chen and Ozkal tell us that this project “weaves songs of resistance into the land, broadcasting women’s distinct, unruly voices on an ancient Eurasian migration route between Istanbul, Tehran, Tashkent, Bishkek, and Xi’an. The five songs were generated by collaborators from communities along the route; it is they who chose the landscapes, the musical genres, and lyrical content.”2 The first layer of representation are the videos. It is interesting that the scenes were shot in rural locations; aside from one video in Istanbul, all the others are in agricultural fields.These locations could be anywhere; that is, they do not signify any single place. This intentional disorientation prevents the spectator from attaching any meaning to the landscape. It does not look like anywhere and therefore it cannot be read as Oriental or Occidental. The exhibit created a sense of expression by people in a place that cannot be easily identified, and therefore cannot be categorized and stereotyped. The project created representations of a region—places, people, and sound—without fulfilling spectators’ exoticizing expectations. The songs themselves also do not signal Eastern styles of music, in that they often include Western instruments and conventional Western notation. Thus, the experience for viewers at Hallwalls was disorientating by design and intended to not help the viewer easily understand what was being communicated. It seems that in this space of confusion should have come a question in the viewer’s mind and imagination: what is the East?More clues are on offer in the book produced simultaneously with the exhibition and bearing the same title, SRS (Silk Road Songbook). It begins with a short essay in English by Chen and Ozkal titled “Grounding,” which includes a discussion of the importance of song: “Singing builds fortitude; singing together builds collective joy and defiance. These are songs of empowerment, channels for human agency.”3 The work then goes beyond de-orientalization and into acts of defiance and resistance, which are expressed through music. A key component of defiance in the songs is the fact that they are all sung by women. The singer in Istanbul, Deniz Taşar, writes in the accompanying text,When the lead vocals begin, an indistinct rhythmic chant accompanies it, which can be decrypted as “the right to freedom cannot be obstructed.” This is linked to all the women who were victims of homicide, all the journalists and intellectuals who were denied the right to write and speak freely, all the silenced victims of this land, and to every brave soul who keeps on fighting. In the outro we hear a spoken word interpretation of my thoughts about the Silk Routes as a woman of this region who is unwittingly inscribed with history and politics.4The gender of the singers is intended to be an expression of defiance against not only the Occidental construct of the East as exotic but of the ruling regimes, which oppress women. Taşar goes as far as imagining the geography of the Silk Routes as a female body that has suffered layers of oppression.The introductory essay, “Grounding,” begins the catalog in its English version. The next section begins with the same essay translated into Turkish. Following this is a short discussion by a collaborator; the song’s text in Turkish and also each of the languages of the project (English, Farsi, Kyrgyz, Chinese, and Uzbek); a photograph of the performers; and the musical notation of the song. The section on Uzbekistan, written by location director Alexey Ulko, underscores the de-orientalizing efforts of the project. While the effect of de-orientalization is worthy of an exhibit, needing to work hard to uncover the meaning of the piece raises questions about the effectiveness of its communicative value. Clearly, the intellectual background needed to understand the exhibit goes beyond what the piece accomplishes. As I watched the videos from the setting of the exhibition in Buffalo, I puzzled over what was being expressed and how visitors from western New York would relate to the project, but when I imagined the piece in Istanbul, my understanding shifted. It was not only that I identified in the first video the newest third bridge across the Bosphorus, which I visited in 2015 before the two halves of the construction were linked together, but the project as a whole reflecting the Istanbulian Weltanschauung of that tremendous city.In Istanbul, the ideological construction of West and East are experienced with ambivalence, but especially those in my imaginary elite Istanbulian viewpoint. Author Orhan Pamuk, for instance, explains how residents of the city experience an uncomfortable feeling of hüzün, like melancholy but combined with W. E. B. Du Bois’s dual consciousness, the comfortable sadness of a ruined past greatness, intruded upon by the sensation of being seen with the judgmental and pitying Western gaze.5 This exhibit strikes out against a visual construct of hüzün, in that there are no identifiable remnants of the past; instead, there is the unidentifiable rural setting. In the songs, however, there is an expression of lost connections in a vast space, interlaced with oppressive politics and poverty, crisscrossed with fallen empires and failed states, feelings of sorrow but also comfort in sadness, of presence—even a kind of grace. While Chen and Ozkal intended that the singers be unruly expressers of resistance, I felt more a quiet presence seeing them surrounded by rural and mostly agricultural landscapes. This does not seem an unwarranted interpretation since the exhibit did not directly or obviously grapple with any direct political or ideological content, such as those often cited from the Istanbulian viewpoint: an uncomfortable relationship with glorifying the Ottoman past, with the twentieth-century project of westernization and modernization, and the turn to Islam to relocate an identity in a neo-Ottoman present. Instead, expressions of grief seemed more evident. This was especially apparent in Baran Ehsaei’s song, “What Is This Song?” That I remember this performance the most vividly was reinforced by viewing the videotaped opening speech for the exhibition in which Ehsaei described how she knew she would be moving from Iran and that this would be her last performance in her country. Her emotion cut through the less emotionally moving performances in the exhibit. Her song seems to ask “How do you love a place that will not love you back?”Certainly, the unanticipated perspective of the viewer of every exhibit transforms the meaning of what is experienced. To some extent being able to slow down and allow oneself to feel another’s expression despite linguistic and cultural distance is fundamental to understanding. The exhibition conveys a sense of longing and loss, and therefore a kind of nostalgia, one uncomfortable with itself—a feeling so common to refugees, exiles, and immigrants, and one Chen and Ozkal express, perhaps unintentionally. By stripping away visual references of place and time, the Silk Road is reconstructed into a new de-orientalized space. In this regard, the exhibition achieved a unique and original representation of the Silk Road through song and landscape.